Is history about to repeat itself in the Mideast?

If you were paying any attention back in the grim days of the early 2000s, events of the present day look increasingly familiar.

History seems poised to repeat itself. The drain of blood and treasure inherent to Middle Eastern warfare that we experienced for more than a decade seems likely to manifest soon in Syria.

The parallels are striking.

In the run-up to President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, we warned in this space that his administration had better be right in its oft-repeated declaration of “clear, incontrovertible evidence” — proof — that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Because if it was mistaken, we warned, the court of world opinion would judge us harshly.

Well, Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. But we turned away from a justifiable war in Afghanistan to settle a president’s personal grudge.

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This time, Syria’s ruling regime has allegedly used chemical weapons in its civil war with rebels, many of whom represent the very same people who flew airliners into our skyscrapers. So now are we to undercut our domestic recovery to supply a fanatical rebellion with weapons and maybe toss a lot of very expensive cruise missiles at Bashar Assad?

In both cases, the rush to war gained momentum after the politico-media complex jumped aboard the bandwagon. (We have been guilty. In this space just last week, we acknowledged that a strike which accomplishes nothing would perhaps be better than doing nothing at all. We’re rethinking that bit of illogic.) Last time, presidential lies and a corroborative parroting of those lies in the national media sold a vengeance-bent public on a fraudulent war in Iraq.

Are things different this time? For a while, President Obama resisted the push from Saudi Arabian interests to topple Assad and tilt the Middle Eastern balance of power away from Iran. The nation, after all, can ill afford another Middle Eastern campaign, and the American people simply and emphatically want nothing to do with more warmaking.

Or are they the same? Once again, weapons of mass destruction tilted the field. The only difference between Iraq then and Syria now is that Syria actually has chemical weapons and seems likely to have used them. Obama foolishly drew a “red line” in the sand that now risks his credibility.

Well, tough. How much credibility does a president deserve when he ran against his predecessor’s transgressions and did next to nothing to remedy them? How do you protect something you no longer possess?

The U.S., after all, has the world’s most extensive track record in the use of weapons of mass destruction. No other nation has dropped an atomic bomb on an enemy. Ronald Reagan helped Iraq win its war with Iran in the 1980s by flooding Iraq with chemical weapons that later played a role in the run-up to our own war against Iraq.

Our interventions in Middle Eastern affairs frequently come back to haunt us. We fail to see how replacing one extremist in Syria with a different kind of extremist helps average Americans. And the weaponry required to help the rebels (read: al Qaida) could very well be used against Americans some day.

The American people must come first in any calculation involving Syrian intervention. In the end, your average Syrian won’t see much difference between the U.S. cruise missile that kills his people and an Assad cruise missile that kills his people.

And we worry about the longer-term effects upon the American character when making war - as opposed to going to war, in the old-fashioned sense of total commitment - remains so easy, remote and removed from our daily lives.

Video-game-controller wars only make it easier for us to make war, again and again, every time our increasingly phony moral sensibilities are affronted by other nations’ messy and frequently tragic internal business.